Return to the heart of duckness

Celebrating a blog birthday seems akin to hiring a Feng Shui consultant to assess the chi of a doghouse. It’s a little silly. Does anyone (besides my mom) care that I’ve been sending chronicles of my food adventures into the ether for a year?

I’ll admit it; I care. I’m not what you’d call an overachiever. I consider it an accomplishment to wash and fold my laundry the same day. For me, sticking to this blog is noteworthy.

I’ve had it in my mind that I should present my readers with something earth-shattering for the one-year benchmark. Of course, the more earth-shattering, like beer-bonging chicken blood or filleting a robin that my cat killed, the more I seem to antagonize people.

But that’s what I do. I push the envelope, not so that you don’t have to, but because I can’t help myself.

Last August, for my first post, I sampled the Asian delicacy balut, a hard-boiled egg laced with a cooked duck embryo. This is still my go-to example of weirdness when people ask me what I write about.

I decided to mark my anniversary with an experience that commemorates my beginnings. It also demonstrates growth, in a flippantly literal way, but also (getting sappy here) for myself.

A year ago, I characterized myself as a local food tourist. This is still true, but along the way I’ve caught the food procurement and preparation bug. More of my posts concern activities in my kitchen instead of restaurants. I’m actually learning how to do stuff.

So here are the thank you’s:
-To my readers, without your interest and encouragement I wouldn’t be able to keep this up. -To the Seattle food community for the endless supply of material.
-To family and friends who have shared my meals, given advice, provided leads and held cameras for me.
-To the Seattle PI for hosting me.

Finally, thanks to the plants and animals who have given their lives so that I might enjoy mine more. Particularly ducks.

Some pretty decent Peking Duck, if I do say so myself

So this is what I did. I made Peking Duck, a fancy Chinese feast-dish often reserved for special occasions. It’s pretty laborious, even though the ingredients are few. There are some variations, but this is the route I chose: roasted duck, chopped into chunks; Hoisin sauce; raw scallions; and paper-thin pancakes used to wrap everything up and deliver to your soon-to-be-extremely-grateful maw.

I’ve had Peking Duck a couple times before. The first time, in Peking. But we don’t call it Peking anymore. Now it’s Beijing, a name that gives us non-Mandarin speakers the impression we’re pronouncing it more authentically. Good for us!

Peking Duck. It sounds kind of hokey, like something the Chinese prepared for the British colonials while they ate something more strange and delicious in the kitchen. For some history of the dish, click here.

Peking Duck is no joke, as you’ll see. It’s not something you throw together when you’re too tired to cook.

I wasn’t even sure Chinatown’s Hau Hau Market would have ducks when I went to pick one up Saturday morning. I had seen them the day before, when I was doing reconnaissance for anniversary blog ideas.

Marked “Duck head on,” just in case you were wondering what that whole face thing was

The Hau Hau had one duck left. It was in the cooler, beak, face, webbed feet and all, among the cow hooves, pork belly and trotters. They had packaged the corpse on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in clear plastic, its head curled across its body. Contortion for the sake of economy. $10.99. Still, the wrap could barely contain the five-pound fowl.

A woman shopping for meat advised me that I could get a pre-cooked duck for a few dollars more.

Ah yes, trying to save the white man from his folly. That just made me want to do it even more.

The Hau Hau cashier dropped my duck into one of the store’s signature blue plastic bags (Oops! Not very green of me…). The Styrofoam tray sagged under the weight of the bird. Too bad the bag hadn’t been clear. That would have started a conversation or two.

Before I got home, I stopped at City Kitchens to pick up a trussing needle and kitchen twine. I felt like such a pro. Or a kid pretending to be an adult, twisting the steering wheel of a parked car.

I got to back to my apartment around 1 pm. I had been up since eight, perusing the Web for recipes. Peking Duck takes hours to prepare. This dish had already claimed my entire Saturday. It was going to be a long one.

I broke my rule of avoiding user-submitted recipes; e.g. Joe Blow in Scranton who says he’s created the world’s greatest chili. I’ve had some bad experiences. But I came across a Peking Duck recipe that gave me the impression I was dealing with some kind of mad genius, or, simply, a Chinese person who knew what was up. [I later found out the “mad genius” had never tried the dish. Apparently they pasted in the recipe from somewhere else. Whoops!]

The process was, well, interesting. Loosen the skin from the muscle (but don’t pull it off), hang it for a few hours to dry and roast it in the oven. The recipe also included these steps:

8. Sew neck cavity as much as needed so there is only a small opening.
9. Insert a drinking straw in neck between skin and meat.
10. Fashion a noose just below opening.
11. Blow as much air as possible through straw into duck to separate skin.
12. Pull noose tightly to seal air in.
13. The duck should fill up like a balloon.

They had me at “balloon.”

My cat Roger, waiting for the moment to strike

What’s the matter, you never shaved a duck before? (Taking off some left over quills)

The first thing, of course, was to take the duck out of the package and clean it. This was easy, although a whole duck with wings, feet and a googly neck with head tends to be unwieldy. Fortunately, it was already gutted and there were no giblets.

For the first few minutes, the eyes and its zany duck smile spooked me. I now realize ducks are the escaped lunatics of the animal kingdom. Warner Brothers made Daffy daffy for a reason.

“Hey, hot stuff, what do you say we take a bottle of hooch to the lake and go skinny-dippin’?”

Next, I worked on loosening the skin, which was difficult as the connective tissues didn’t want to let go. I was amazed by the thickness of the skin. It was at least three times thicker than a chicken’s. Probably what makes duck so fatty.

I gave up on the process after splitting the skin at the base of the breast. I was supposed to keep it intact for balloon time, so I got out my trussing needle and string. I closed up the skin with a stitch job that looked like it was done in the activity room at a rehab clinic.

Frankenduck

But trussing is fun. You’re not going to wear what you’re sewing up, so you can get a little Frankenstein on it. Plus you get to use a needle the size of a chopstick.

The ballooning didn’t work. I hadn’t detached all of the skin from the muscle. When I cut the hole in the neck, stuck in the straw and blew, nothing happened. An un-inflated duck would have to suffice.

Following my mysterious recipe, I dunked the duck into boiling water and honey to “wash off surface fat and tighten pores.” So there’s your Eating Weird beauty tip: for clear, healthy skin, plunge your face into boiling water. Or not.

“You sure you don’t want to join me?”

I made a noose from the cooking twine, tied it around the duck’s neck and hung it from a hook that a previous tenant had left in my ceiling. There it was: strange fruit hanging in a Capitol Hill window. Screams from passerby seemed like an inevitability, or perhaps a call to the police and an order to cease and desist the desecration of game meat.

Some people put up Christmas lights….

The recipe instructed me to set a fan by the bird to speed up the drying process “until skin feels like parchment.” I don’t know what parchment feels like, and I had no plans to recreate the Dead Sea Scrolls on a waterfowl. We would see.

I hate to break it to you, but you’re dead

In the interim, I prepared the scallions. I learned a great trick, and it was easy. I cut off the scallions a couple of inches above the white section. I cut crosses into the tops part way down, giving them a spray effect, like those splayed-out, glow-tipped, fiber-optic decorations from the seventies. The scallions went into a bowl of ice water and into the fridge.

Hey, look, a picture that isn’t disturbing

I waited around. I didn’t want to make the “Mandarin pancakes,” as my about.com recipe called them, because I didn’t want them to dry out. In the meantime, my neighbor Sean came over with his dad, who is married to Chinese woman. He said he was impressed and took a couple buddy shots of me with my pet/meal duck.

My apartment manager Rob also stopped by. I was worried he might cook up some obscure regulation to make me take down my spinning bird. We talked through my kitchen window. The whole time, I kept thinking, please don’t look in the living room, please don’t look…

My girlfriend Erin came over after the duck had been up for a few hours. Because I’m a nice guy, I warned her of the “Silence of the Lambs” scenario going on in my apartment. She still gasped when she walked in the door.

“That’s a duck hanging in your window.” I believe those were her words.

There were still a couple hours before the skin would supposedly reach parchment stage. So Erin and I took a nap. We slept, with the duck swinging in the corner. Watching.

Still life with duck. And fan

I still had to make the Mandarin pancakes. Erin bakes, and baking scares me the way a meal with a face scares her. I was hoping she could help me decipher the strange recipe. Basically, we had to make a dough; roll it out super thin; cut it into 3-inch rounds; paint the tops with sesame oil; stack them in pairs, oiled sides touching; roll out the pairs into 6-inch rounds; and fry them in a pan and pull them apart after cooking, leaving the oiled insides uncooked.

Got all that?

My lovely assistant Erin, taking care of breadness

To my surprise, it worked, but they tasted like dough. I tried cooking them more, but this only dried them out. Also, we hadn’t rolled them thin enough. I didn’t want the pancakes to come out lousy after all the effort I’d taken with the duck. I called my friend Jessica, who makes mu shu, but she told me she used store-bought tortillas. Erin was nice enough to run to her house and grab some tortillas in case we couldn’t stomach our doughy wonders.

I took down the duck, posed with it (Erin took pictures) and named it Peta. I guess I’m not a nice person.

Here’s looking at you, kid

The skin had dried out, but it hadn’t changed much over the course of several hours. It would have to do. One gross thing: the tongue had separated into two layers. The bottom part looked like a strip of peeled skin. Yum. Anyway, I put the bird on a roasting rack, threw it in the oven and hoped for the best.

Within 10 minutes it was smoking. Following directions, I turned down the heat five minutes later and let it cook for about an hour. When I took it out, the skin had a deep, rich mahogany glaze. The feet and head were almost blackened. Honestly, I had no idea if it was done.

It’s all over, Peta. You’re just going to have to be delicious for us

The best part was the vista of liquid fat I could see through a gap in my stitching job. It was like staring into a nocturnal pool. I lifted up the beast and poured it out. There must have been at least half a pint.

I brought the duck over to the table and set it on the cutting board. I lifted my cleaver and brought it down onto the neck, cutting it clean through. Erin shrieked. It was a “Christmas Story” moment. But she got through it. She was a good sport.

Right before the big moment

Big man, tough guy, bad ass, etc.

The horror thus set aside, we had a delicious feast. As far as I was concerned, the duck was perfect. The meat was good and juicy, and being a dark meat fan, I couldn’t have been happier. I ate the skin with abandon. It was so crispy and flavorful, a miracle considering the only “spice” was honey. Good job, Peta.

We wrapped the duck and scallions in the pancakes (and tortillas) and dipped it in the hoisin sauce. The fresh scallions added a refreshing, aromatic crunch. I have to admit, I didn’t love the thick, sweet, soy-based hoisin sauce. It reminded me of medicine. Used sparingly, it did impart an interesting tang, but I was very careful with it. I bet it would have been better homemade.

And our pancakes weren’t bad. With the other flavors, I didn’t notice the doughy taste. But they definitely should have been thinner.